Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Author and Aviator, Dies at 94

By ERIC PACE

Published: February 8, 2001

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the lyrical author and aviator whose marriage to Charles A. Lindbergh brought her both joy and tragedy, died yesterday at her home in Passumpsic, Vt. She was 94.

Their daughter Reeve Lindbergh wrote in her 1998 memoir "Under a Wing" (Simon & Schuster) that her mother had suffered adverse effects from her advancing age and from strokes and was "often confused in her mind, and in fragile health."

Anne Morrow Lindbergh scored an immense literary success in midlife with her 1955 book "Gift From the Sea" ( Pantheon) which was a philosophical meditation on women's lives in this century. It was on the nonfiction best-seller list of The New York Times for 80 weeks and was No. 1 for 47 of those weeks. In the book's first 20 years in print, more than five million copies were sold in hardcover and paperback editions.

Mrs. Lindbergh was the author of more than two dozen books of prose and poetry, including five volumes of diaries; her work was often acclaimed by critics and popular with readers. Despite the literary distinction that she achieved, her life was largely shaped by two dramatic experiences when she was in her 20's. One was blissful, one was anguished. They were reflected in the title of a volume of her diaries: "Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead"(1973, Harcourt, Brace)

'He Is Taller Than Anyone Else'

The first experience came in 1927 when Anne Morrow, then a 21-year-old senior at Smith College, arrived for the Christmas holidays in Mexico City, where her well-to-do father, Dwight W. Morrow, was the American ambassador. There she met Charles Lindbergh, whose courageous solo flight across the Atlantic had made him a hero of mythic proportions and the most famous man in the world. He was staying with her family, and the sight of the boyish aviator tugged at her heartstrings.

"He is taller than anyone else," she wrote in her diary. "You see his head in a moving crowd, and you notice his glance, where it turns, as though it were keener, clearer and brighter than anyone else's, lit with a more intense fire. What could I say to this boy? Anything I might say would be trivial and superficial, like pink frosting flowers. I felt the whole world before this to be frivolous, superficial, ephemeral."

Two years later the man known as Lucky Lindy married the shy, literary Miss Morrow. The glamorous Lindberghs were seldom out of the news as they made pioneering flights to Latin America and Asia, becoming "the First Couple of the Skies." As the critic Alfred Kazin observed, "To millions around the world — reading of the Lindberghs flying everywhere in their own Lockheed Sirius seaplane, looking at photographs of the ‘perfect'-looking couple (‘the Lone Eagle and his mate') landing in Siberia, China, Japan — the Lindberghs seemed to enjoy the greatest possible good fortune that a young couple could have."

But that second experience came four years later, on the evening of March 1, 1932, in Hopewell, N.J., where the Lindberghs were at home with their 20-month-old son, Charles Jr., and a nurse, Betty Gow. The nurse looked in now and then on Charlie as he slept in his crib.

"At 10 Betty went in to the baby, shut the window, then lit the electric stove, then turned to the bed; it was empty, and the sides still up," Mrs. Lindbergh wrote later in a letter to her mother-in-law. At first Miss Gow thought Lindbergh had taken his son from the crib for a joke, Mrs. Lindbergh continued, adding poignantly, "I did, until I saw his face." Lindbergh, looking down at his diminutive wife, said, "Anne, they have stolen our baby."

The Lindberghs were soon enveloped in the horror of the kidnapping, the discovery of the child's body on May 12, more than 10 weeks later, and the subsequent arrest, trial, conviction and execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a carpenter, for Charlie's murder in 1936 .

They had always been "intensely private persons with an austere, restrained, glowingly creative sense of life," Mr. Kazin wrote. Both had a fear of crowds and nothing, even Lindbergh's 1927 landing in Paris, had prepared them for the carnival of reporters, photographers, con artists, curiosity-seekers, vandals and crazy people who had invaded their lives after their baby was kidnapped. Americans would not experience a similar flood of publicity until the O.J. Simpson murder trial of the 1990's.

The Literary Career She Always Wanted

Mrs. Lindbergh would never get over her child's death but she went on to bear five more children and to have the literary career she had dreamed of. The historian Geoffrey C. Ward wrote in 1998 that "‘Gift from the Sea' became a source of inspiration for a whole generation of wives and mothers — ‘the great vacationless class,' she called them — who, like herself, were beginning to search for more fulfilling lives once their children had grown and moved away."

Mrs. Lindbergh echoed many women's concerns with observations like this: "What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. Look at us. We run a tightrope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now! This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul."